Mad about Innovation

Why the iOS Files app should replace iCloud Photos for some people

iCloud Photos is great for some people. You take a picture and it is backed up automatically and appears on all your Apple devices. Others however have a hard time with iCloud Photos. I have a number of friends who have come to me for help before. Their iPhones having only a few megabytes of free space left.
The problem occurs because when you delete a picture/video from the device it also gets deleted from iCloud Photos. Which then means even if you’re paying for the 1Terabyte(TB) tier of iCloud. It doesn’t give you any extra space for photos/videos because the real constraint is the on device storage. So until iPhones and iPads have 1TB and more of storage some people will run into this problem. Now sure there are other online services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos, Flickr, etc. The one drawback to these services on an iPhone and iPad when compared to iCloud Photos is they don’t automatically backup the pictures/videos in the camera roll. It has to be done manually by the user. Which is a huge drawback for many users. Alot of users also worry about how the pictures/videos are backed up. If the services apply compression to the backed up copy then only the original has full fidelity. Forget manually moving the pictures/videos to computers and external storage. This method died long ago when pictures started to just live on forever on devices.
Personally I move my pictures/videos to external storage and then upload them all to Flickr but I’m somewhat of an exception. A free Flickr account offers 1TB of uncompressed storage for photos and videos. But some people won’t use it because it was owned by Yahoo and now SmugMug. It also wont backup the camera roll automatically. I have an iPad Pro and when the Files app was introduced I started to use it more and more to store my photos and access them on my different devices. There are many upsides as well and I definitely believe that eventually it will take iCloud Photos’ place or be rolled together. The upsides are, it’s owned by Apple, the images are I assume stored uncompressed, and deleting them from the device doesn’t affect the copy in the Files app. Then the only thing left is to have it automatically backup all the photos/videos from the iPhone to a “Camera Roll” folder in the Images directory. Users could sign up for a 1TB iCloud tier and delete the photos/videos from their devices whenever they want and still access them through the Files app. It would certainly fix all of my friend’s gripes.
I get that iCloud Photo is meant to backup the photos/videos. Yes if you delete the photo/video from your device and from the Files app it’s gone. But there are many different solutions to this that could be done behind the scenes. Deleting photos/videos on the device puts it in the Deleted area where it lives for 30 days. The same could be done for the Files app giving the user 30 days to recover them on either the device or in the Files app. iCloud Backup could backup the files in the Files app allowing the user to also restore the photos/vidoes from backup. These are all just feeble attempts from me at a solution. Imagine what Apple could deliver. I personally think it’s inevitable and all the behind the scenes work is being done right now.